HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS
1) HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS – DEFINITION
Historical linguistics - the study of how language changes over time and the processes involved in these
changes.
The study of languages from the point of view of their historical development is called diachronic analysis.
Historical linguistics deals with written sources, and there are number of problems with written sources:
2) Problems with written sources
i. it is assumed that man has been using language for at least tens of thousands of years but written records
go back only some 5000 years
ii. there is never one-to-one fit between a language and its writing system
iii. Orthography is conservative – it tends to remain fixed even though the language itself is constantly
changing
iv. Writing tends to be in a relatively formal and conservative style, especially if it stems from before the
16th c.
v. Historical linguistics is interested in the living language of a particular historical period not in
orthography of that time.
3) Periods of English development, samples
The history of English is divided into three periods:
Old English (OE) (or Anglo-Saxon) ca. till the beginning of the 12th c. (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle)
Se cyning het hie feohtan ongean Peohtas; and hie swa dydon, and sige hæfdon swa hwær hie comon.
The king ordered them to fight against the Picts; and they did so, and had victory wherever they came.
Middle English (ME) (Chaucer) (12th – till the Renaissance and Shakespeare)
Ye know eek, that in form of speche is chaunge
With-inne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho
That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thinketh hem; and yet they spake ham so.
-
change and strange - pronounced with a diphthong;
price, nice – pronounced with a high front vowel;
ye, hem (=them) – no longer used;
year – now has a regular plural ending
hadden, thinketh – inflectional endings are present here;
Us thinketh hem – impersonal construction no longer used;
nyce (=nice) – here means foolish, strange
Modern English (after the Renaissance)
What is now Standard English is a descendant of the dialect of London
4) LEVELS OF LANGUAGE CHANGE
SOUND CHANGE
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language changes constantly in terms of its phonetic realization due to such factors as:
- laziness of pronunciation
- speed of articulation;
- the sociolinguistic circumstances of the speech act
every time we pronounce something, it is different, but words and sounds of a language have their
average pronunciation;
over a period of time the pronunciation of an entire speech community may change
a new type of articulation will be adopted first by a small group of speakers
this new articulation is called a phonological innovation
gradually it will be adopted by other speakers and it will spread
There are several degrees of sound change
- a change affects only a small number of sounds, not affecting the whole system,
e.g. in early MidE the consonants /t d n/ were dentals (as in Polish), but over the centuries
their articulation has been progressively retracted and now they are alveolar;
- a sound change may introduce allophonic variation into a language without altering the number of its
phonemes
e.g. OE voiceless stops /p t k/ were unaspirated, now they are
- a sound change alters the number of phonemes: increases it or reduces.
e.g. the velar nasal /ŋ/ used to be an allophone, now it has a status of a phoneme.
A sound change can have a number of forms:
- it may affect the place of articulation
- a manner of articulation
e.g. stops may become fricatives
in the 15th C. MidE /d/ became // -- moder became mother
- the position of the velum (nasal sounds become denasalised or non-nasals become nasalised)
- the change in the glottal articulation (change in voicing)
e.g. in the year 700 AD OE /f  s/ developed voiced allophones /v  z/
Sound changes are divided into three main groups:
- sporadic (they affect only a few isolated words)
- unconditioned (=context-free) – all the members of a particular phoneme undergo a change no
matter of their position and environment;
- conditioned – occur only in a particular environment
Conditioned sound changes are the most interesting for the historical linguistics because they say much
about what is happening in a language.
There are many types of conditioned sound changes:
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assmilation
(a sound becomes more similar to another sound in terms of its articulation)
e.g. /k/ (voiceless velar plosive) has been palatalised and affricated by following front vowels kirka
became church, in Polish: ręka but rączka
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dissimilation
(a sound becomes less similar than another sound in a word)
e.g. the Latin word turtur (turtle) had its final consonant changed after being adopted into English.
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metathesis
(the sequence of sounds in a word is reversed or switched around)
e.g. compare milk/mleko, garden/ogród
-
haplology
(the complete loss of one of two identical adjacent syllables)
tragikokomiczny  tragikomiczny
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loss
(a sound may be either completely or partially lost from a language)
e.g. in English /k/ has been lost in word-initial position before /n/ but retained elsewhere knowledge –
acknowledge, final /r/ is lost everywhere but in inter-vocalic position
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split
(phonemisation of allophones – allophones acquire the status of phonemes)
in OE /v  z/ were voiced allophones of /f  s/, but they became phonemes.
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merger
(two sound so change that they become one phoneme)
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excrescence
(a sound appears in a language)
GRAMMAR CHANGE
The English language is a good example of how a language can change grammatically.
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OE was an inflectional language, with a rich inflectional system as Latin or Polish;
over centuries, the endings were lost and syntactic relationships are expressed by means of word order;
analogy is a strong force in grammar change – forms are modified to make them fit a pattern established
by other forms
e.g. OE nouns had many different plural endings, but in the 15th –s ending became dominant, and
slowly irregular endings were substituted (only a limited number remains).
LEXICAL CHANGE
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the lexicon of a language is most susceptible to change – some words become archaic and used no more,
new words appear
new words may be added to the lexicon in a number of ways:
Creating new words
- new words can be formed to express new ideas or concepts
- usually existing morphemes of a language are used
- we have listed some ways of enriching vocabulary when we were talking about morphology:
compounding, affixation, acronymy, blending, abbreviation, back formation
- there are other ways of creating new words:
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root creation
making up a word out of nothing
e.g. gas, nylon, rayon
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functional shift (=conversion, zero-derivation),
a word is converted from one part of speech to another without affixation
e.g.
noun  verb
knee- to knee
preposition to noun 
to know ins and outs
verb  noun
must – a must
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commonization
a proper name becomes used as a common noun
e.g. Earl of Sandwich  a sandwich, a diesel engine, a bowie knife
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taboo deformation
the conscious alternation of a word in order to avoid saying something which violates social or
religious conventions
e.g. die  to pass away, to meet the maker, to leave the vale of tears
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folk etymology
a process in which words are reformed due to a popular association with another unrelated word
e.g. the MidE word bridegome (from bryd bride and guma man) came to be associated with the word
groom and was reformed into bridegroom.
Borrowing
- A language may borrow elements of derivational morphology, i.e. affixes, e.g. in-, de-, super-, (from
Latin) tele-, -phobia (from Greek).
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Borrowing can have a profound effect on a language’s vocabulary, e.g. Modern English is said to be in
50-60% borrowings from French and Latin.
Semantic change
- a word sometimes changes its meaning – we say that it has undergone a semantic change
- there are a number of types of semantic change:
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generalisation
the scope of the meaning of a word is widened
e.g. barn used to mean a storehouse for barley but now is used for any large farm building
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specialisation
the scope of the meaning of a word is narrowed
e.g. deer used to mean any type of animal (cf. German Tier) now only one kind of animal, meat used
to mean any type of food (cf. sweetmeat) , now only flesh of animals
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pejoration
the value judgement associated with a word has been lowered
e.g. knave used to mean ’boy’ (cf. German Knabe), now it means an unprincipled, crafty man
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amelioration
the opposite, the word begins to mean something better than it used to
kobieta in Polish (till the 18th c pejorative, replaces niewiasta)
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metaphoric transfer
foot (of a man)  the lowest part of a man  foot of a tree, of a mountain
5) MOTIVATION FOR LANGUAGE CHANGE
1) the contact between languages is the strongest motivating factor
2) language as a system strives naturally for symmetry and regularity in its structure
3) linguistic change is the result of imperfect learning by children – discontinuity of language
transmission between older and younger generations
4) a principle of the least effort